Between Hands and Pixels: Maternal Making for Tender Digital Holding

Between Hands and Pixels examines how maternal holding, with its slow labour, conflicting pulls, and sustained-but-fractured attention, can inform new perspectives on digital touch. Holding is treated as multidimensional, encompassing bodily cradling, emotional containment, and the distributed care facilitated by digital mediation. Dominant digital touch paradigms centre on vibration, instant haptics, or co-located replication, often overlooking duration, ambivalence, and ethical connection, compressing relational labour into notifications or read receipts. Through tactile videos, lacquered assemblages, and a living digital garden of process notes, this research documents micro-attentions and material traces that design conventions tend to overlook. I introduce with\holding, a practice-based methodological approach that centers pause, partial reveal, staged consent, and relational connection, showing how subtle temporal and material cues can shape slow, care-focused interaction. In relation to the conference theme Tide + Tied, this paper introduces friction rather than seamless flow: pauses, distance, and residue become integral to generative design, prompting reflection on the ethics and aesthetics of being held or holding at a distance. Preliminary findings suggest opacity, delay, and lingering traces are vital attunements for exploring intimacy at a distance. The work offers a reframing of digital touch through maternal practices, practice-based methods for intimate media, speculative touch experiments, and a living archive for tender digital holding.